Court reluctantly bars state sentence because youth’s last crime was nonviolent

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Sometimes a court, even the state’s highest court, questions the result of the ruling it’s about to issue but finds that the law is clear-cut. That’s what happened this week when the California Supreme Court rejected a state sentence for a teenager whose crimes were mostly violent — but not the most recent one.

Sixteen-year-old D.B. was convicted in a Sacramento County juvenile court of a series of crimes that started in May 2010 when he punched a man in the face, breaking his jaw, then, along with a companion, took the man’s wallet and drove off in his car. Police spotted him later that day in another stolen car, but he got away. He was caught a week later, gave a false name and ran off, but was soon captured and was identified by his initial victim, the court said.

The judge found that D.B. had committed robbery, battery with great bodily injury and vehicle theft in the first incident, and later resisted arrest and falsely identified himself to a police officer. The judge sentenced him to the maximum term of 11 years and 8 months in state custody, in the Division of Juvenile Facilities.

But a California law, intended to reduce the number of youths in state institutions, allows state confinement only if a juvenile’s most recent offense was either a violent crime or a sex offense. A state appeals court ruled, and the state’s high court agreed unanimously, that the law didn’t apply to D.B. because his most recent offenses — resisting arrest and falsely identifying himself — weren’t violent. That means he must be transferred to a county juvenile hall or other local supervision.

“We must conclude the Legislature meant what it said even if the outcome strikes us as unwise or disagreeable,” Justice Carol Corrigan said in the court’s 7-0 decision Thursday. She rejected prosecutors’ claim that D.B.’s crimes over the one-week period should be considered together because they were charged in a single document.

The intent of the law, passed in 2008 and updated in 2012, was to reserve state juvenile facilities for the most serious offenders and shift others to the counties, Corrigan said. She said prosecutors could adjust to the law by simply not charging less-serious offenses that occur more recently than a violent crime that would qualify the youth for state custody. Or they could ask the Legislature to amend the law again.